Donna Tartt Quotes About Literature
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To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.
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I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.
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But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work
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My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
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So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.
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I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.
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I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.
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In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.
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Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time
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Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
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Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.
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There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
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Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent
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Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
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When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
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I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
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I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
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Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
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The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
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The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
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